Tag Archives: MIT

At the heart of all lithium-ion batteries is a simple reaction: Lithium ions dissolved in an electrolyte solution “intercalate” or insert themselves into a solid electrode during battery discharge. When they de-intercalate and return to the electrolyte, the battery charges. This process happens thousands of times throughout the life of a battery. The amount of power that the battery can …

Concrete already builds our world, and now it’s one step closer to powering it, too. Made by combining cement, water, ultra-fine carbon black (with nanoscale particles), and electrolytes, electron-conducting carbon concrete (ec3, pronounced “e-c-cubed”) creates a conductive “nanonetwork” inside concrete that could enable everyday structures like walls, sidewalks, and bridges to store and release electrical energy. In other words, the …

While investors are busy pouring billions of dollars into humanoid robots, an MIT roboticist who has been making robots for three decades claims they are wasting their money. Rodney Brooks, the cofounder of Roomba vacuum creator iRobot, said the idea of humanoid robots as catchall assistants, the future Elon Musk envisions, is “pure fantasy thinking,” in part because robots are coordination-challenged.  …

Transistors, the building blocks of modern electronics, are typically made of silicon. Because it’s a semiconductor, this material can control the flow of electricity in a circuit. But silicon has fundamental physical limits that restrict how compact and energy-efficient a transistor can be. MIT researchers have now replaced silicon with a magnetic semiconductor, creating a magnetic transistor that could enable …

The artificial intelligence models that turn text into images are also useful for generating new materials. Over the last few years, generative materials models from companies like Google, Microsoft, and Meta have drawn on their training data to help researchers design tens of millions of new materials. But when it comes to designing materials with exotic quantum properties like superconductivity …

How would you react if your mother admitted to you she was dating Aubrey “Drake” Graham, the rap superstar from Toronto? And that this new boyfriend wasn’t the real flesh-and-blood Drake — oh no — but is instead the AI chatbot version of Champagne Papi. This is an actual situation that was relayed by the Drake-dating mother in question in …

The ground-shaking that an earthquake generates is only a fraction of the total energy that a quake releases. A quake can also generate a flash of heat, along with a domino-like fracturing of underground rocks. But exactly how much energy goes into each of these three processes is exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to measure in the field. Now MIT …

MIT physicists propose a “neutrino laser,” a quantum-driven burst of neutrinos that could revolutionize communication and medical technology. Credit: Jose-Luis Olivares, MIT; Adapted by SciTechDaily.com Super-cooling radioactive atoms could create a laser-like neutrino beam, potentially opening a new avenue for studying these elusive particles and even enabling novel forms of communication. Every instant, torrents of neutrinos pass through our bodies …

When cells are healthy, we don’t expect them to suddenly change cell types. A skin cell on your hand won’t naturally morph into a brain cell, and vice versa. That’s thanks to epigenetic memory, which enables the expression of various genes to “lock in” throughout a cell’s lifetime. Failure of this memory can lead to diseases, such as cancer. Traditionally, …

MIT Professor Emeritus Rainer Weiss ’55, PhD ’62, a renowned experimental physicist and Nobel laureate whose groundbreaking work confirmed a longstanding prediction about the nature of the universe, passed away on Aug. 25. He was 92. Weiss conceived of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) for detecting ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves, and was later a leader of …